As the use of the Internet is becoming more popular, more web applications are deployed. An application as used herein generally refers to a program or a suite of programs executable by one or more processors to perform tasks and/or functions. A web application broadly refers to an application accessible with a network access application (e.g., a browser) over a network (e.g., an intranet, the Internet, etc.). The web application is typically executed on a web server at the backend, while the network access application acts as a client (also referred to as a thin client) at the front end. One conventional practice in providing web applications is to use a proxy server (also referred to as a web proxy) to interface between a browser and a web server. The proxy server may forward requests and/or responses between application servers and browsers on different client machines. A series of interactions between an application server and a browser may be referred to as a web session. A web session is typically initiated by a user of the browser logging in and terminated by the user logging out.
Having the proxy server to provide a middle layer between the application servers and clients running browsers allows changing the application servers, adding application servers, removing application servers, and/or partitioning different kinds of requests from the clients to different application servers. However, as the content served by the application servers gets more complex, the application servers may become overloaded.